Evaluating spatial configuration of fire stations based on real-time traffic

Abstract

Fire stations play a key role in controlling typical thermal runaway phenomena (fires). Based on real-time traffic, we develop a data crawling and processing algorithm for travel times, and propose an evaluation model for the spatial configuration of fire stations. In the model, the fire service levels are divided into four levels based on the total fire service score (TFSS). The present work gathered 16,448 fire incidents in Changsha, China from 2013 to 2017 as fire service demand points, and the minimum travel times for each fire incident point in the four evaluation scenarios with different real-time traffics were extracted from online maps. The results show that the TFSSs of Changsha varied from 67.92 to 74.05 due to the insufficient firefighting resources and the dynamic traffic conditions, and the fire service level of Changsha can be defined as fair. By employing spatial visualization, we observed that the fire service demand points with moderate and poor fire service levels were mainly located in rural areas, and those with good and fair fire service levels were located in urban areas.

Keywords

• Fire station
• Spatial configuration
• Online maps
• Real-time traffic